


Pride and Joy

by Lavender_Seaglass



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Cole is called by his real name, Elvhen Language, F/M, I Ship It, Inquisitor drank from the Well, Maybe - Freeform, Not A Happy Ending, Solas doesn't win, Solas is successful, andruil/ghilan'nain - Freeform, but more like references than actually there, everyone dies, for like everything, he doesn't actually see it, kind of a twist but you can totally guess what it is, maybe mythal too?, mythology time, speculation on the evanuris, spoilers by the way, the sky falls, weird theories sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-02-02
Packaged: 2019-03-10 01:39:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13494128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavender_Seaglass/pseuds/Lavender_Seaglass
Summary: Solas achieves his goal: he rectifies his greatest mistake in the only way that he can. He destroys the world.





	1. i.

**Author's Note:**

> Ayyy, so this will be the last thing I write before focussing again on my big project (probably) but it's an idea that I've had bouncing around my head probably the longest. It had taken on many different forms and outlines, until I finally decided, hey, why don't I plot this out and actually write it? Before I lose the strong feelings I have about it, at least. So here you go. A three part-er, that's not too long, and that's not too happy either.

**I** t wasn't meant to end like this. Death lies at the end—he had said that, he had told her that when he finally had shared with her the truth she wanted to know, when two years and too many months hadn't lessened to any infinitesimal degree the aching loss of her, when he had saved what remained of her life from being consumed by his curse she accidentally was condemned to carry. Chance had not been kind to her.

He had taken back his tool, his power, his magic, from her unwilling, but not ungraceful, possession. He had left her free of this binding link already so close to being lethal—a state it had deteriorated to after his own willing departure—when he could no longer be by her side to tend it and coax it and keep it in check with what remained of his waned ability. But he had also kissed her. And then been unable to look back for the last time.

She could have died after that. She could have been a casualty in the chaos to come. She could have succumbed to chance and circumstance, to natural causes that plague her kind.

Though of all of this could be, it isn't what would happen to her. No—what it will be is something else, it will be the one fate he thought they both should have avoided, after everything else that had happened beyond his control.

Lying on the cold marble floor, supine on her back in some forsaken corner of Tevinter she never would have seen if only he had woken in another Age, she looks heavenwards as her life leaks out of her. Scarlet streams spill out in all directions. They stretch and sprawl like rivers recorded by an omnipotent cartographer's impossible hand. Or, like those seen on her war table, the great hulking beast of a burden that once let her see all the world many thought she could straddle, if she didn't wish to simply mediate its petty, insignificant complaints and rows as she worked to save all of them.

And save all of it. She had saved the world. She saved the world he had destroyed when he attempted his own rescuing of a people within it.

Being a legend, the power that comes with it, that admiration, that attention garnered, the attracted two-faced betrayers—none of it was enough to change anything. It had not made her immortal. Like him, she is not a god. Whatever she became it was never more than mortal.

But that doesn't make her blood any less stunning a sight. Or his mind any better able to accept the inexorable muting of a vibrant, precious life that will happen now.

How is it, he might have wondered in another lifetime, in the one in which he was still himself, that he could manage to make himself more guilty? Could Solas have understood there were even more transgressions he could make so near the closing of the final act of his last plan?

The fires in their brass braziers are burning low now. They will, at some point, need to be fed by someone's magic. Their restive, brooding multicoloured flames blaze even as they hunger, and desire, and need, and burn themselves out to nothing. The only steady light in this place comes from the luminescent eluvian he took to get here. Left open, its shimmering opalescence is bright as a standing sun in the darkening night around it. It is the source of the slanted bar of bright phantasmagoria by which he is seeing the last of her emptying eyes.

And, as he gets to his knees, he sees: she is smiling. Her body has produced an aqueous ring in the edges of her eyes in its attempts to express her—something.

Fear? Happiness? Euphoria? Relief?

At finally being free?

The item he fought her for he puts aside. An artefact, worshiped as a fetish and holy relic, of Dumat. Only a handful of shemlen ever had an inkling that the void-infused staff was once handled by an elf. He was the vanquisher and tamer of the sun, the All-Father, the first among his people. It sings promises of emptiness to allure him, the rebel, to an absolution he doesn't deserve the second it leaves his grasp and clatters to the ground in an unceremonious dumping.

She must register that he is there. A tremor goes through her body. A twitch disrupts her serene gaze, and he wishes it weren't like this. On his knees he shuffles to her side quickly regardless of what may come to get on him. He is already stained and tarnished beyond anything that ever could be considered clean or good or pure again.

He hesitates. Seconds he does not have to waste elide into indecision—a painful pulse flickers over him, as he remembers one of the reasons for his reluctance. If he wanted her to give him invitation, even now, in this state, he could just will her to. She would do whatever he wanted until the very end. She would give him the last remaining bit of herself. Because of a sacrifice she could have no idea about, because of a transmigration she could not comprehend. Only Mythal, who was once his best friend, and murdered, had been capable of the foresight required to be prescient of the help he would beg of her, before taking it with the blackest sorrow. And now he could kill her highest servant with a vagary.

That, at least, is something he can keep from passing.

After time has brought closer the things which must come to pass, he reaches out for her. Not out of kindness to himself. He has already allowed himself too many liberties with her to last all of his different lifetimes—even his other self would agree with this in his weakest, most besotted state. Gently, fingers like floating wisps above her delicate, paling cheek, he looks until she shivers and he understands wholly that she is letting him know the best she is able that this is more than her consenting. She is telling him to do it. Make the contact and bring her comfort. Like he would handle a brittle shell or a glass bell eons old, he lets himself touch her skin with his fingertips.

In the wavering eluvian glow her lips move to say she is sorry. And there is something else, she is going to say it, but then nothing comes, she cannot manage it after all. All she can say is, “I failed. To protect you from yourself. And I—”

Her sweet voice, which never could hold a tune, not once ever in his hearing, falls silent to him. If this is how the humans felt after their old false gods abandoned them, then they might have an understanding approaching a grain of the sand that lies forever shifting and damned and in perpetual twilight in his yawning desert of loss. For more irretrievable seconds he sits there with blood seeping up the dark fur pinned all around him. The worst of the weeping is from her shoulder. There he had felled her when she had taken on the form once used only by the highest of the high—for, as she roared at him, and came right for him, he finally understood something about the respect so many naturally have for those great soaring beasts. He really had been frightened that it might have all been over before he had a chance to finish what needed to be done. And, out of all the things that have ever been in the world, few have earned the respect of his true fear.

But he had not faltered in his mission. He had gathered his strength and shot her down and soon she reverted to her lesser, weak, broken, body.

It is fourth most devastating thing he has ever done, but he lets her lie. Instead of risking abridging her life with any additional harm the trauma of more serious touch might induce, he bows down. Head low, forehead to the floor like a pleading supplicant, his nose and mouth are lost in her hair. There too he will lose the still-beating heart of what he never should have had in the first place. Not with anyone, but especially not her, whom he cared for above all others in this doomed, dying, devastated world. Like a prayer, he parts his lips and presses into her skin, “ _Ar lath ma vhenan_.”

Then he pulls away, and her eyes are clear as a conscious on the day it is born. The perfect pair of them coruscate in the magical, star-bright light. Like the moons they gleam with borrowed radiance. She breathes, “... _Lath. Ir abelas. Thuast ma tel'nea neal ne_.”

He has to get up. He has to get moving. The rest of the enemy's forces will be here soon, after so long not hearing from the woman who not doubt insisted they stay back for their own sakes. It is likely one of his agents, who are braver than cowards, might come through soon driven by their first doubts of his ability to handle this recovery mission successfully on his own. And he does not want to face any of it. This has all been enough—he has killed far too many for any one person, he's sure without needing to mull it over he's responsible for more lives lost than all his brethren and subservient People ever could have together tallied.

That she will soon be another single stroke among the galaxy he has etched into his soul, there's nothing to be done about it. Not unless he were to just do it now. By his own decisive and merciful hand.

He looks down at her placid face cast at the firmament.

No.

He cannot.

Something stirs in the shadows.

Fen'Harel picks up Elgar'nan's staff. The final piece of the plan he has constructed of disparate parts is fully within his control. So he departs from this place. Behind him the eluvian shuts with nothing more than a thought extinguishing the last light on the four hundred corpses choking the temple's cold floor.

 

.

 

 **A** top a mountain, a solemn shadow astride a solemn peak, he begins the process of casting his spell. Like all real, true magic, it will take hours to complete, but what a thing it will be—the first of its kind in Ages. In the distance there is a light he can see on the earth. It is the honour guard left at what was once his castle, the people meant to alert someone if he were spotted, to signal if they saw him trying to tear down the sky, to herald an announced intent to end another world. Magic that knocked him out for all those Ages—if he had to sleep so long, surely it would be something elaborate and hard to miss even on his second attempt at it.

But that's not always the case: that things correspond so neatly, that effort matches at all yielded results and consequences, intended or not. Usually such clean causation and calculations are not the way it works out.

Some things are simple in reality. Like a spell, a closed door, a smile at a loved one. All of it just requires some will, and some energy, and it is done. But that does not mean what has happened, is over. The effects may echo and resonate and cascade and build up to produce something much grander.

Where they might have made their mistake in judging him is this: creation is harder than destruction. It's infinitely more complicated and consuming. That's why people think only gods are capable of it. Fear you, if you can.

This is something that's always been true.

 

**.**

 

 **W** hen he wakes again he walks in a barren world. And he doesn't understand where to begin, the confusion of forming the questions alone makes his failing body pause in the field of drifting snow he is wandering through.

How has he survived?

How has the world fared?

What will happen next?

Finally he has to stop. The snow is deep enough to bury himself in and so blanket him from the blizzard he can see coming and hear in the lamenting wind. Chapped lips, chattering teeth, calves numbed to useless nubs, he conjures to himself a glorious gout of flame for his faltering effort.

Magic flows freely through the world. Through him, for this moment. Then it is out of him again.

He digs, he bundles up his mantle, lays his head down, tucks his knees to his chest beneath his chin, curls up like a dying animal that knows it is about to pass. He slips away.

 

**.**

 

 **I** nto the Fade. Like passing through a thin, dry membrane, he arrives in another realm. There is no-one to greet him. There is no-one to shun him, thank him, hate him.

Above him threads of violet, indigo, and green shiver like intentions on the edge of invoking emotions. The air is bristling with raw possibility—all it would take is someone to imagine it, and it would be. The city, a prison, once at the centre of everywhere, is gone.

He walks for days. Still, there is no-one to see him, and he has to save himself from the mounting evidence of his greatest, deadliest, infernal fear: his inevitable success. That, because of it, he is alone. For he alone survived him, he alone made it through the radical reverse of reality that could restore and mend the worse mistake made in over ten thousand years.

He is here, in the Fade. Where, no matter where he goes, there he still is. And the person he is is reflected back at him by whatever surroundings he can manage to find himself in. He is tortured further by his own devastating reduction: he is no longer able to access the roads that would take him deeper into familiar and beloved places. Those roads are lost to him now, sealed by his own lack of.

What could be months or years later, he spots something in the distance that is not afflicted by him.

He runs to it. Desperation makes him move faster than he thought he might manage to again.

A hat, pale hair and eyes, sallow skin. Like a weak, poorly made candle that would melt away and fail to hold a burning wick, compassion does not appear strong, or well, or able to offer much light.

Despite this appearance, however, Compassion still extends a hand to him, he who is panting, and is offering things elusive in this world. Warmth, company, understanding, an idea of what may be coming. “Do you want to see?”

He, he who should be dead, nods. He cannot bear to speak.

Their surroundings change. They melt, they fade, they roil, they reform into a place twice called home.

“I don't want to be here. I want to see, not remember. Regret unlike breathing is all I can do at the sight of these stones, choking, gagging, too much pain, too much not gained, too much everything, strangled by what I did. Sacred, scared, scarred, over the mountain, into the sun, the first sight was meant to take a breath away. I didn't know I would be happy here.”

He cannot stop Compassion. He cannot change what has happened here. He cannot change what this place remembers.

As for what he remembers—he can't help it either. The memories are welling, they are gathering, they are getting ready to drown him in a collapsing crest and cruel current. And he is far too tired to try to swim up and break the surface once he is below it.

“Why? I don't need a reminder. No, I—I. I need to learn. There is something here not known yet. But you will see it, before it is too late for you to know and understand what is and what could have been. A happiness you missed out on, like a seed planted, precious, patient, but forgotten by the sun. The care she showed to spare you wasn't meant to be wasted.”

Compassion is gone.

Left alone again he falls to the mud and doesn't know, once more, what to do. Something to learn, he repeats to himself. But what is here, that remains, that isn't one of his plentiful mistakes he's hated himself for a thousand times before? He cannot begin to fathom it.

He doesn't want to be here. He doesn't want to see this. But nor does he deserve to be spared this, he supposes.

Already a shade of her is staggering up the stairs that will take her to the main hall. She tried to speak to him. It was important. It was something he should know, she had said, before the end, before something irreversible could happen.

He had turned away. Said she should focus on what she needed to do to save them all.

To survive, one last time.

He had left her. He hadn't seen what had happened next. He didn't know that she made it halfway up the next flight, where she stopped, and then hunched over herself to be sick. That the force of her retching was louder than any splattering on the stones beneath her unstable feet.

Nerves, he thinks, stress caused by his callous cruelty shown to spare her from something even worse.

Then Leliana comes out to her, and he isn't so sure. Not anymore.

The shadow goes to the miserable memory's side and says something and then they both are no longer there.

As if they are still trying to keep a secret from him.

**.**

 


	2. ii.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dying, Solas is haunted by his mistakes.

**H** e starts in the courtyard. Of all places, the practical uses of this space had almost always brought him as much comfort as the occasional bouts of solitude he had managed to find here. The ground beneath his stepping foot had once yielded some of the rarest, some of the most useful, some of the most sought after herbs. Rich with the decay of plentiful autumnal leaves, the soil has always benefited from the interminable elongation of his favoured season. The crisp air, the explosive abundance and bountiful harvest of it, the putrescent glory of the dying rebel refusing to let go, before rot and mass death overcome everything. The subtle shading of each day of a weary reality towards a silent sleep when darkness would far outlast the light—he has always found something whimsical about a time that is a twilight for the whole world.

When he was younger he wanted it to be always fall in Skyhold. So, with his plentiful and power magic, he made it so.

Now, as he shuffles his bare feet down the overgrown path, it is hard for him to pick out anything distinguishing that might tell him what the true season is. What trees have not died and turned to black skeletons look as if they might finally shed their final leaves, for good this time. Like overripe fruit they hang heavy and low whatever their actual weight, wilted and so weak that any breeze to blow by would rip their molding stems.

But there is no wind.

There are no real natural forces here.

Unable to go further just now, he sits in the centre of this long untended place, and something begins to stir in the still corners of the dusky shadows. From the feral flowerbeds and the umber piles built-up over thin, nodular roots, memories left here rise up to meet him.

_In a nameless forest on an unknown day, under a canopy composed of choking choleric branches conquesting to claim the most domain, having overcome the sun in their frenzied fighting, they made day as dark as night, beneath a grim darkness the wolf stalked until he caught up with the huntress who had felled her prey. The huntress began tying it up and preparing it for transport. She would keep it, at least, to turn into something useful, if she did not put it to a better use. If it did not become a trophy, this prey would become another body to dump into the grisly pits she was set on filling. Soon she would have enough to perform her next rite of sacrifice. Soon, among a shallow sea of effluvia and viscera, she could return to the void and start testing her unmatched mettle against the next unknowable one on her list. The plague she had set upon her own lands had already given her nearly enough power to allow her next hunt._

_It was just that waiting, only waiting, when it wasn’t a necessary part of a heart-thrilling chase, one of those lulls that are mandatory when you’re trying to trick your prey into convincing itself it’s safe, outside of a hunt that wasn’t something she could do. Being idle was something that she couldn’t manage even when she had had most of her sense about her._

_Now, in the transformative throes of the corrupting magic she had wrought her own armour of, she was even less sensible than before. And to start with she had always been  a lowly thing, one of those simple people who talk about simple pleasures, who act as if contentment is plenty, she gave chase simply because it gave her the highest pleasure she had ever known. She did not have the mental wherewithal to imagine, or understand, that there could be anything better than her own experience._

_When she had fallen in love, she had fallen for her partner because of her imagination. Ghilan’nain, fair and pale and fragile, cutting through compunction with a single shy smile, who draped her white hair over her gleaming shoulder like a dream, she had flushed when the huntress came to her and fell to her feet to declare her need for her._

_Keep creating, the huntress begged, give something to challenge me, and I will give you the power to do so. Gladly. Whatever you need. Just create for me. The beautiful woman blushed and knelt too and accepted humbly the offer with her best and most convincing acting to date. In her pride, she tried to imagine what more she might have gotten out of the other woman, even as she reached a trembling hand to her muscled shoulder, and waited, to be kissed and ravished and pleasured further by this exquisitely gullible creature._

_And this is where her spurious modesty had landed her, for even her most ingenious wiles and heinous beasts could not satisfy forever a woman who revelled only in the hunt. In a nameless forest on an unknown day, Ghilan’nain was dying, bleeding from her dainty shoulder where Andruil precisely pierced her little lithe fleeing form from an inconceivable distance away. The arrows used were pulsing with a spreading infection that was the antithesis of anything ever alive. If she were not helped soon, it would suffuse through her, and then consume her, and change her as it had her unrecognisable lover. She would go mad. She would die._

_Ghilan’nain cried out. Weakly, fearfully, earnestly. Her coral lips bit down around the gag silencing her ugly outrage. She had never thought that this was how it would end. If either of them were to kill the other, it would have been her to be the one to do the easy outwitting. The bound woman glowed in the shrouded gloom like the morning’s last struggling star._

_The wolf watched them as they had this twisted falling out._

_He was not the one to help, for he could be hunted too. He knew his own limits. Which might be the first that ever could have been said of him, but he couldn’t help but be vigilant and cautious just then, not when he had even a whiff of self-preservation. For when the huntress’s eyes suddenly scanned her surroundings for others who might try to snatch her prey from her clutches, the red that shone out from them was evil. Only barely did their lurid emptiness not leave him stunned. The lingering afterimage burnt into his mind and gaze was more malefic than anything else he has ever known—it could not compare to even the most unspeakable rituals Dirthamen thought he conducted solely and wholly in furtive darkness._

_He lost focus on the subject of his observation as he skulked backwards into the false safety of more shadow. There he thought he was hidden and he trembled, once, as he coaxed breath back into his clenched lungs._

_The wolf was not the one to help. It was the dragon, who descended suddenly, to intervene. The power of her wingbeats rent the world and cracked open the darkness and let the righteous light roar in. She landed and then she fought the huntress and she rescued the victim, this time. And then she told the huntress she would be back after she sorted this out._

_She should beware, the dragon said, for she knew the way to stop her. In days the reign of horrible chaos she has brought to back with her would be over. The doom she had brought upon the world would be ended._

_And the dragon knew, there was no way the huntress could know of her advantage. That her borrowed draconic blood gave her enough resistance to be immune to the unnatural magic she had stolen from the void._

_The huntress howled, the huntress cackled, the huntress tittered, the huntress cried. She beat her chest at the loss of her prize and then she picked up the bow she crafted out of nothingness and the germination of a world-eating disease. The arrow she readied was tipped with a crystal containing a shrieking disdain for life’s gross abundance. This was her answer to the threat that now stood between her and the destruction she needed to fuel her next act of dominance._

_The dragon departed before her strategy and winning advantage could be revealed. She would be back. She would find the huntress in days—she had meant what she’d said. Then she would save the huntress from her own folly for the sake of peace in all of the world._

_When the huntress finally was saved, she tracked down the wolf because she remembered some things after everything else has been stripped of her. Despite the merciful purging Mythal tried to conduct on her mind, not everything was gone. A flash of curious, prying eyes was something that remained however clever and careful he thought he had been in his lurking. When he was frightened, he hadn’t been aware of what he had become. Something soft, something inchoate, unresolved and unconvicted, a breathless exhalation of fear that sways only the tips of leaves. Still, her profoundly singular senses had been sharp enough to detect the results of his cowardice._

_The wolf, who was within in his strong fortress this time, did not fear the huntress now. He had his own advantage over her: he knew everything else that she had lost._

_And he would not share it with her._

_Nothing, besides this, to intentionally bait her: I know what you did. I know why your beloved shies away now from even your fleeting glances. You will have to ask her to describe your betrayal._

_Enraged, embarrassed, wrathful, but weak, Andruil screeched and cried and then cursed his rebel name. She set her sights on him, and it was what he wanted her to do._

_She aimed her next arrow at him and shot it._

_In so doing she turned her attention away from the People, at least for a little while._

_When the arrow reached him it hit his roof and insinuated itself harmlessly between a couple of tiles. He did not have to replace a single one._

_But he left the arrow there anyway. It became something he could point to proudly to prove a point._

 

**.**

 

 **N** o, he thinks. Not this, he tries. Something else, he begs. The similarities are there but that doesn’t mean they are parallels or even coincidences. Forget about trying to make himself think there isn’t anything of meaning or import there—he just wants it to end. To stop this recollection, he takes a step forward, away from his past, to put the distant parts of it outside of his own grasp.

She had said that he was like this. Prone to drama—finding connections, and threads, and trying to make sense of why things were.  With a caress of his shoulder, a fond look up into his eyes, she told him she noticed how much he liked the plot and intrigue that could be found in life. And she told him she liked that about him.

Solas walks into the empty hall, and a desiccated length of wood that once was part of the door cracks beneath his step. The quick anguish of it echoes in the cavernous space with nowhere else to go. Not even the blizzard of cobwebs can muffle it.

_After he tricked them, his victory was not yet quite complete. He could not call himself successful in carrying out his plan until he had sundered the world, and then imprisoned his enemies in a similar fashion. He split them, he trapped them, he immured a piece of every single one of them in a body that was but one of their forms. The principle part of their beings he locked away in an unreachable place, but, without these small bits of themselves, they could not be whole, they could not awaken._

_They could not roam the earth again, and so they would stay trapped and outwitted. Forever._

_Which meant for the rest of time, a force that his People were now beginning to feel, that was now starting to kill them._

_But he could not change that. He had made his decision, he had taken his course of action, and now he too was dying._

_And he saw too late what he had done. He realised too late that he would have to undo it._

_So he did the only thing he could. With his tail between his legs, the wolf retreated to lick his wounds, he went to hide in his den and plot and brood and hate. Undoubtedly they would soon misconstrue this as planning his revenge—or something else, but what did it matter? It was very possible that none of them would be alive by the time he could help them again._

_When he stepped into the great raw room carved into the side of his mountain, he stood for a moment at the open mirror. In this intersection of power that gave him access to all of the world, he bowed his head and gave his agents their instructions. Then he walked through the light and into darkness._

_Behind him the eluvian shut and was one of the many things they would in his absence scatter to unknown places. To be forgotten until they needed to be found again by people who knew where and how to look._

_But he was not yet done with his procession to the grave. He took out a bottle and swallowed its contents—inside him blossomed power stolen from a titan’s blood. The blue glow was soft and gentle in his mind. The mellifluous song of it sounded like a sympathetic and quiet melody lulling him to peace._

_He knew better, however. He ignored it and instead made use of the borrowed strength it gave him._

_He went deeper into the darkness._

_He walked deeper into the earth._

_He travelled deeper than the places the children of the stone were starting to forget._

_A sunless sea beat at a vertical shore that was the precipitous edge which he tried not to fall over._

_Then he passed into a vast nothingness left by death. The great cavern echoed almost infinitely with each of his steps in a space where a titan had lived and thought and felt, before he and she banded together to take it down. When it had died the light that was sun in this place had been extinguished._

_Faintly—and it could have been his imagination, he didn’t doubt that, in his state—he felt the artefact that had once been the heart of it pulse with agony. It was a feeling he could understand. His own torment was just beginning at that point._

_When he got to a suitable place he took out his foci and ran his fingers over the cold, hard, silent grooves. What power remained to be felt was nothing. It was just echoes, just imagined, he hadn’t felt anything like lingering sentience after all. Death had come, and death is final. Nothing can ever change that._

_It was a comforting thought, then._

_Something to look forward to. Even if they did take his heart from him, or he cut it out himself, once he was gone, that was it. No suffering would remain._

_He stowed his orb, he laid his head down. He let himself sleep. On the way to the Fade, protected by the vastness and emptiness of the ravaged bowels of the earth, he felt water on his face. Salty, and bitter, and stinging, and responsible for untold slaughter._

But, he tells himself, he did not sob, because the sounds of his own anguish would have woken him. As he recalls it the lyrium had not quite faded by the time he was finally able to rest.

Forced to watch himself like this, he hates himself anew. He always has been as pathetic as he knows he is.

This is nothing novel to him. This is not a new perspective he is seeing anything from.

So what, exactly, is he supposed to see? It can’t be himself, he thinks, because this is just a waste of time and magic, which may be renewable and infinite and easily accessible now, but it is still a resource and should be respected.

It can’t be her.

It can’t be, he thinks.

He already knows what he will see: that she cared for him, that she said, “you can trust me,” that she would have given him everything and anything else besides, that she stood there, the wind in her hair and the soft light on her face as she invited him to come to her and express himself, that she helped him immediately when he needed it, without a thought of herself, of how it might help to increase his attraction to her, how she easily and willingly and lovingly listened to whatever he had to say.

And when he had almost accidentally let slip himself, by growing too enthusiastic over intrigue and guile like there were in the games he used to play in the background of, she was too taken with him to notice. A slight glaze on her eyes—nothing more substantial or worrying than a light layer of lust—told him everything he needed to know how lost she was. To him, and within him. He could have easily had whatever he might have wanted.

Whatever it was that he was selfish enough to take from her, he did have.

Coming upon the circular open room now, he is greeted by an aching surprise: his own sentiments and experiences, and the lense of emotion he put on everything, expressed back at him in vivid and stark and still flowing detail. He had told her it was the history of the Inquisition—and it was. It was an institution she had guided, and that he had been with, from its very nascent.

Running his hand over his gifts to her, not a single flakelet of paint clings to his fingers. Even in this dream of a place, nothing about them is diminished. His technique is just that good, and she had never asked that they be destroyed. Not even painted over.

His hand, which had once made his feelings real, is now useless at his side. He cannot even clutch his fingers together.

He is so very tired.

 

**.**

 

_**H** e did not take her away to try and tell her the truth. He thought about it, and the advantages of it, and it would have been easier. But in the end he decided it would better for her if he were to do it in a place where she felt safe. It was not lost on him the place she did so was somewhere he had led her and decided to share with her, and that he had smiled when she made it her own. _

_After a bit of searching he found her in one of the more obscure libraries. Not a hard place to get to. Namely, it was just hard to get away from. The path from it to everywhere else had multiple routes, twists and possible turns to trick you back. He had kept some of his more treasured books among these open shelves; if anyone wished to read them they needed to have at least a little bit of cunning to get to and from them. That seemed to him a more than fair bargain to learn some things about him—he, who was the ignominious trickster troublemaker, said to be out on the prowl to disparage all of them out of his jealousy of their prosperity._

_Here, in his territory, in his hold, in his home, they said other things of him. But that was a long time ago._

_Now, she was here. She was folded in a great cushioned chair she made look even more oversized with her diminutive size. It also did not help that she looked like a sleeping bird roosting. She tended to sit with her feet curled up underneath her, her shoulders slouched inwards, and a hand over her mouth as if she always needed to conceal her expression lest even unseen persons scrutinise her for it. Allowed freedom of movement, she chose to lessen her impact on the world to the least it could be with her still living in it. This, compared to how she had tried to change everything else in the world that was unfair, and unjust. It was a provoking contrast. That he found these quirks of hers attractive, he put that far from his mind. He had something to tell her. They had to have a serious conversation._

_Then she looked up at him, and she smiled at him, a small stretch of lips that had sanctified him many times before, and he saw how she was affected just by his being._

_He saw that he brought her too much happiness._

_And right then and there was when he knew that it was over. That it had to be, soon. Before he would endanger her even more._

_The staggering loss of this stripped him of his calm and all his ordered and rational and logical thoughts for a moment. But he did not falter. He had come too far and too close after so much adversity to let anything stop him now._

_He started towards her again._

_“Hello,” she said, in a low and airless way, as if she were amazed by the sheer fact of him, addressing him as he had addressed her plenty of times, though with a familiar amusement and levity playing with the corners of her pink lips. She thought she knew him at this point. She did not have a suspicion about the denouement he now knew must come to past, and had every intention of seeing through however bitter and tearful its results._

_Nodding, he came in close to her. The one thing he would let himself have was this: a finger under her chin, a gentle urge to tilt her head to him, then an eager reply from her he had anticipated, followed by a lowering of himself to kiss her to spare her the maximum amount of discomfit. He was soft and lingering, fighting his own greed, still and silent like a poised pause._

_When he came up she cocked her head and looked at him. “Really, nothing? Usually you’ve said at least something by now.”_

_Such tenderness, such lightness. What could he say to her, other than the truth?_

_Only something to force her to retreat from him and into the safety of a broken, hurting heart._

_“I just wanted to warn you, once more, about...the Well. That magic you took into yourself, that agreement you made—are you sure you really understand what a geas entails?”_

_“Are you still upset with me about that, Solas?”_

_“I only want to prepare you for what could happen.”_

_She closed the book in her hands, laid it respectfully in her lap, and folded her hands over its cover. She looked at him and her brow started to show signs of contraction, like a storm starting to gather on a near horizon._

_“What exactly are you saying, Solas?”_

_“I will not always be here for you.”_

_“That’s all right. I don’t need you to protect me all the time. I am a grown woman, after all.”_

_“No, vhenan. I know you are...amazing.”_

_But his pause had damned him. He had given her too much time to think when he hesitated—her, the brilliant and bright and impossible being who proved far too clever for her own good, and too compassionate too. It was only by some of the strangest luck he had ever witnessed she had been able to survive herself several times, including the time she stumbled upon them when they fled through the mountains in a bog of snow that came up in some places to her thighs. Catching up to them almost killed her but had she managed to do it._

_“Is that really it? Are you really just here to compliment me and warn me about elvhen magic you’ve already told me about?”_

_“No.” Another pause. One he hoped would be his last. “No. I fear I cannot do this anymore.”_

_“What?” She would not be so pleading for long._

_“Please, you must understand. I can’t. You have to stay away from me.”_

_“Solas, what’s going on?”_

_“Please.”_

_“What? What are you talking about? Is this because I drank from the well?”_

_“No, it’s. Vhenan—”_

_She was starting to get out of the chair now. He didn’t want her to, but he could not stop her from standing on her legs that could barely keep her up._

_“Vhenan,” she spat back at him. “It’s because I’m not enough,” she told him. Her anger rushed on, its eddies roiling in her eyes and swirling in her stance. “Did you really think you could get away with lying to me, Solas? I know I’m not enough. I never was, and I never will be because I’m never going to be an elf, or even a proper elf at that.”_

_What she meant, though she did not know it, was an elf like him. An ancient one. The way that they should be, and would be, if he had not brought destruction to them._

_She continued, one finger pointed firmly and accusingly and as a condemnation into her own chest. “But you, you’re just something else, aren’t you? You’re selfish enough to start something with me, and selfish enough to end it when you decided it’s not working for you, and selfish enough to not care at all what happens to me because of it. But I’m alive, Solas. I’m a person. And I don’t want to be used like that, I—”_

_The battery was too much on his brittle, poorly-believed defenses. As they crumbled around him like he imagined reality would soon, he recoiled and forgot that he once had believed that there was a certain nobility in reticence. One that has always been beyond him, but one he could respect. This all would have been easier on both of them if she didn’t fight back like this, but then—_

_But then, he probably would never have loved her either._

_“Yes,” he acknowledged. “You are alive. You are living. You are beautiful. You are—”_

_Impossible._

_Doomed._

_Soon, unknowably to her, to be given to his control. Passed over to him like a piece of property._

_Everything, he said with his next and sudden kiss. Taking her to him, he crushed her against his body and tried to hold her there with a clutching grasp on her narrow back. The width of her was no greater than his two hands, but she did not surrender. Her slender form fought back—and she pulled away from him, and she stepped back, and she faced him. Like always she was making him come to her._

_A challenge in her shining frenetic eyes, an insult in the tilt of her head, so much danger in her stance alone. Desperation and urgency boiled inside of him. He still wished to rage at something, or anyone, though not at her, about the choice she had made, that mistake which would soon bind her to him even further. He would never be able to separate himself from her completely, and that was what they both wanted, wasn’t it?_

_A foolish, ill-considered, capricious desire._

_He gave into it. He seized her hip with a grip hard enough to bruise, yanked her forward, and after that it became a mess of tangles and gasps and groans as they vied for power between the two of them._

_At some point, she bit him. Hard._

_He forced her back to the wall of carved wood in response. He looked at her briefly in a hardening, closing moment, he towered over her, and then he flipped her around and things started to blur again._

_Of course he could not mark her. That was a difference he had always stressed between him and all of the others whom he was compared with—he did not make a mark of ownership on the lives of others. Even the Forbidden ones, who kept no slaves, even they sought to subjugate. He did not._

_What he made, was allies._

_But there was not an alliance he could make with her now. There was not a single promise that he could keep._

_So, what was left to him—what was the one thing he could do, and the only thing he could do, was make a claim._

_Wrenching himself and her, he bit down her and he pierced skin and tasted blood. He felt her stiffening and bucking and he heard her scream. Long after it had ended it would echo in his mind, when its turbulent churn was not rushing and racing with the bedlam of his own roving, radical primordial heart._

_After this atavistic action, he shoved his knee between her legs and rubbed it against her until she was writhing and even louder in her begging. She knew the motion and he knew that she would be able to tell what was different about it this time. He was giving her a warning._

_She did not ask him to stop._

_The rest of it, what it is that happened next—anyone with an imagination would be able to see it coming._

_( He broke her. Her focus shattered under his power, and his passion. He wanted her to feel how wrong she was. To not be able to think, anymore, she was anything less than this to him. )_

_When he left her it took all of his strength to overcome his shame with each and every step. None of the steps he took made it any easier either. The distance he put between himself and her made only made his hurt worse. His love for her was a force that made him attracted to her, and, the farther he fled, the more he needed to go back and apologise and hold her and make sure she understood none of this was her fault. The mistake was his—always had been his. Whatever she may have done she was not to blame for his weakness._

_But he did not go back._

_And it would not be for two years until he would tell her the truth, when he finally told her why he left her that day._

This is something he deserves to remember. The suffocating pangs in his chest are the bare minimum of what he should experience in retribution for his actions.

But—what of her? What had she demanded from him in order to set the scales between them to a balance closer to something even?

Sitting down now, he thinks on this, and he does not have a good answer. Surely it’s not just he who thinks he should have had to answer for what he did. She tried to approach him, she tried to ask him to listen to her, but, other than a snipe or two of a comment he could easily deflect with a turned shoulder, it feels to him now that nothing had come of her refusal to accept his decision to leave her.

Rather, when he had told her the truth in the Crossroads right before he had taken back the Anchor she had borne for years, she had looked up at him, and she had _smiled._  

He remembers that now. Between her cries of pain and pleading, and her refusal to leave him to himself, she ultimately had smiled at him.

At a loss quite suddenly, Solas shifts on his seat of dried leaves and detritus. The decrepit state of the keep doesn’t make sense if anyone put any effort at all in into trying to maintain it after he took down the Veil. So, he figures, they must have abandoned it, after everyone stationed here was obliterated in the initial fallout. He crosses his legs, satisfied with this conclusion.

He still does not have one about her, however. Something had happened between his leaving her, and his orchestrated reunion with her. In that time between his grasp on her had been nebulous at best—more an idea he had, that he still wanted to help her, and keep her safe, if he could. Not just because she had something that belonged to him, or because, if he were a different person, he would make her his belonging by compulsion of the geas she was under. It was because he still loved her, with all his aching and bleeding and hardening heart.

All the same, it was not until after what he had intended to be the last time he ever saw her, only then did he check up on her in her dreams, out of concern for the dear life that he had cut himself out of.

In her dream he did a get a clue: _in a clearing before a knoll green and gentle enough to be a vernal scene in the mildest part of Ferelden, he saw her. Her and another man. But she was smiling, as she looked on at the playing fair-haired child. Who, at a glance, you could say looked like her, and the man sitting at her side._

_He knew that he should have left it alone. But, by then, he was more than a trespasser._

_When he stalked Cullen’s dreams for a week he could not find evidence of anything. She was not a part of his life, at least not anymore, in any important way._

_And where he looked there was no child he could find. He visited her several times more, and never, not once, did he ever catch sight of that fair-haired child again._

He didn’t stop visiting her, but he did have to be more careful about it. She had started to try and reach him—without urgency, without tears, but all the same she still reached. There was something she wanted to tell him.

Right up to their last true last time, in the night before their battle.

He closes his eyes, unable to resist the pain he can relish, and maybe even learn something from.

_At a crossroads that was neither here nor there, they stood together._

_The human woman came over to the six-eyed wolf, gladly got on her knees, and touched his black head. He allowed her to do this. In his submission he was allowed the benediction of her soft fingers and telling callouses. He was reassured that she had lived a life after all._

_“This is it, isn’t it?”_

_He answered her by giving a low, haunting whine. His snout nudged her hand away from him and he started to pad silently away._

_“Well, then nothing’s different. But just try to listen, all right? I know it was never something that came easily to you, but I think that’s the last thing you could do for me.”_

_He stopped then. Over his shoulder he looked and considered her request._

_But she was gone._

_She had vanished from her own dream._

Lost in his dream, he wonders how long he had to be alone.

 

**.**

 


	3. coda.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas gets one last look at things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eeeey, what can I say, other than, thank you so much for reading. o7 I hope someone may like reading it half as much as I liked writing it. And now I will go see myself to the dumpster.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ6Mzvh3XCc for those interested in what was listened to

**H** e sat there, and time passed.

Around him it continues to do so. Seconds pooled together into minutes that clumped into hours that dragged like a turgid stream, a knotted clog of algae and slick untangable anxieties, slowly pulling over a body barely able to move.

Weeks collected at his feet. They rose to his half-bent knees. His stomach, his breast, his shoulders. The mantle pinned at his chest shrugged when, after a while, he gathered enough energy to spend on shifting himself. Months reached his chin and across from him the murals still shone out with emotion and meaning as bright as the first time his sensuous mind had conceived them.

Time remained stagnant but, if there were ever to be a wave disrupting the silent stillness, he would have to move within in, caught like seaweed, forced to bow over and over if he did not want to get torn out and washed away somewhere into the depths of an abyss he no longer had a way to navigate. When he had had his attention turned towards something else all of it had left him, like so many priceless trinkets falling out of a closely-kept bag accidentally left open, like a golden antique compass slipping out of your loosened hand, over the railing, and into the churning sea. Yet you only notice its absence when you next need it and it is no longer there to be used.

Rolling his head against the firm wall, Solas expends his energy to get a glimpse up at the Fade’s sky. Sunless, moonless, starless air shimmers with the potency of unbridled magic. It is free, like a gust of wind, to go to and from wherever it will. There are no longer limits to what might be. The currents of it ripples, and expand, and they flow. Witness this—with will, there could manipulation leading to creation. Primordial wanderlust settles and begins to wonder what wonders it may be capable of. Someday it will awe itself.

The wheel turns.

He opens his eyes, because he is no longer alone. The spirit is one he is dimly sure he should recognise. Its name is there, and then gone, vanished like breathed steam.

“Would you like to see?” the spirit asks of him.

“You are not her.”

“Would you like me to leave?”

“Why are you here?”

“I want to help you too.”

He doesn’t understand it, but the embers of his will have been scattered enough by now to no longer allow him to refuse the offer of such an undeserved thing. Quietly he sits and waits for what comes next. Inside he is a gasp away from praising her. He, who has never worshipped anything in his too long life.

 

**.**

 

 **W** hen he walks away from her that day he leaves her with no choice. Irrevocably, she will have to be on her guard. It is time to start down the path that is alternate and divergent from what she wants, disparate from her hopes, likely to cut off any future that might resemble what she had come to long for in the course of her most important year of life. Like a blossom, the doubt opened up inside of her and grew, filling up her lungs and choking out her throat, with roots that tangled into her core and would not let go. There would be no uprooting this growth. She would just have to tend it and not let it overwhelm her.

Leliana, who was the one who mentioned a contingency plan in the first place, who has always been five steps ahead of everyone before they take even one, she looks across the war table. It is not a stretch to imagine that she can see all of Thedas besides.

Between them lies the sundered remains of the orbs. Its largest slice is balanced on its curved back somewhere in the Waking Sea.

“So, what am I do?” she asked her spymaster.

“We have already discussed your options. You just need to choose now.”

They had discussed options several times at various opportunities allowed by the chaos of these days—there are no plans she recalls ever once liking. All the places recommended to her she has been to before. Yet, when she tries to picture them as a sanctuary, all that comes to her is a solid vision of something else. A white, perfect, towering woman, flawless and blazing to behold, an impossible sized statue rising up with a terrible storm of sand and red dust raging in the distance where her tranquil gaze is set. Above she reaches with two she reaches with two pious hands—up, up, towards the heavens where people still think the Maker might once have dwelt before he departed in disgusted despair for the sins of his children that he could no longer abide.

The Well tells her: here. Go here, if you want to be safe. Too tired from her victory still, she cannot win the fight against the incessant voices that easily override her wishes and indifferently ignore her pleas. The only thing they do when she asks is answer with the one thing they have decided to say.

As irritating and unhelpful as their staunch monotony came Morrigan’s cryptic parting before she disappeared into an unremarkable night. She remembers that the other woman told her with an overtly knowing smile: “Human mothers give birth to human children.”

Varric, who had to return to Kirkwall, offered to give a new start. As anonymous as someone like him could offer, anyway. He promised his best effort.

Finally, she has to admit to herself that what she can do, if she wants to preserve a chance at safety, is take one of other options offered to her by Leliana. If the Well is speaking to her of what she thinks it is, then it is nonsense—she cannot travel all the way to the Anderfels to give birth beneath a statue of Andraste.

She sighs. She crosses her arms. She feels a bit sick.

“I think the Avvar are the best choice.”

Leliana waits. Unmoved, and patient, a statue herself. Perhaps she will be a better Divine than anyone could have thought. Even Divine Victoria could not have possessed such piercing prescience to see through all that was to come, and all that was to be prevented, and all that would remain standing.

“If...anything were to happen to me, they would keep it. They would not hand the child over to the Chantry. No matter what, that is the one thing I will make sure it does not have to face—I believe you will make things better, but you have to understand. They have taken enough of my blood.”

There are plenty of things that made her bleed. The phylactery they made for her when she had lived six winters, the punishments she received for speaking out or looking up until she learnt to do neither, the time she spent running with unleashed templars hot and gleeful on her heels, the year that she gave in service to a dead Divine’s organisation, after she had tried to help that old screaming woman and been cast into the Fade when she failed. All of it has left her drier than tractless blight-ridden land.

If she had been able to ask him, she knows that he would agree. No child—whether his or not—should ever have to be anything less than free. And, when magic comes, it should be nurtured, and respected, and not feared.

“To the Avvar it is then. I hope you enjoy your diplomatic mission, Inquisitor First-Thaw.”

She tries to smile through the growing doubt she has to swallow around.

 

**.**

 

“ **W** hat are you showing me?”

“Regret, hope, fear, guilt—the things of which your dreams are made. The things which inspire your kind, and mine.”

“What about hers?”

“Hers?”

“Her kind.” The Fade filters over his heavy body. The ends of his fingers are numb with nullity.

“Are you not one of them?”

No, he wants to say, but he does not possess the power he would need to explain himself. To make clear to them both that he was not what anyone thought he was, that he never has been.

Shifting like a mirage at midday, the spirit appears to shake its coronaed head. It said, “Behold mortality.”

 

**.**

 

 **S** he feels like she is dying. No matter what the Avvar midwife might tell her with the most sympathetic and kindest or whimsical of smiles, she cannot believe it to be otherwise. And, when it is not her body that is failing her, it is her mind. Her dreams take her to such strange places—

_White like the sun all around to see, a note rings out into nothingness to make black. An empty ages passes and then there is colour. None of this is new—none of this is old. Knowledge, like sweat, drips down her forehead and collects in her brow. In the hollow of her neck her pulse races like accelerated days._

_She sees a forest populated by sentient peoples. They live among the trees—between branches they float on dreams of bridges and walkways and pathways constructed of ringing crystal. An impossible ship meanders through clear air resonating with the last chorus of centuries of spells._

The voices of the Well do not stop their chorused murmurs when she is awake. It is just easier to ignore them, when the pain of her screaming nerves is there to drown them out. The crashing of the ocean helps too. Its constant cacophony is a comfort to her too colourful, too crowded mind. Its even tempo—aside from the occasional fit of outrage of a seasonal storm—helps pull her through the days that are too even and too similar to tell apart from her position stuck on the ground amidst them. And so it remains until nothing can help bring her peace—for her own cries bring a chaos down on the hold and keep it bound under a relentless aural tyranny.

Her labour is harsh, and terrifying, and long.

But when it is finally over days later—when she is the weakest she has ever been—she does not falter in making the decision which is most important. Her resolve remains the same. She looks at the child, she cradles her daughter for a second, and then she turns her head until the burden is taken away.

She is not fit to be a mother, she knows.

This is for the best for everyone.

Asked for the name she intended, she gives them Nellas, and then she is ready to not survive this tribulation.

Above her the silent darkened shelter constructed by barbarians is the one thing that does not judge her decision. She keeps her eyes focussed on it while her body refuses to give up, until she is healed and healthy as she has ever been. And there is no more delaying her return to action after that.

Only later would she understand that her new pace of closing rifts was hastening her end.

 

**.**

 

“ **N** o, she was not trying to kill herself. Not then,” the spirit answers, before the question is asked.

He wants to nod, he wants to speak, he wants to acknowledge it. He finds that he cannot even reliably blink his eyes.

After a while, the spirit chooses to continue with its next answer.

 

**.**

 

 **I** n this moment she does not think that she is being watched, or that she could be watched, not yet. It is the first time she has broken the surface and felt warm in the sun for longer than her dim mind can recollect. The memories of her last smile are not something she has any longer.

But none of that matters. Not a bit of that matters anymore. Suddenly the courses the future could take have been radically altered into something unknowable, hinging all on this question: can he be stopped?

Cullen, who sits by her side in the green and gold springtime light, who has provided her this chance to see her daughter before she is transported north, will be one of the ones who help decide the answer. He had not minded when she vowed that they—who were what remained of the Inquisition then—would save their friend. He had not argued that, when she spoke so fervently and passionately, she revealed what she meant to say, which was something else: they were doing this to save her lover.

He, Cullen, is someone who has found contentment and satisfaction in his life. Wholeness, if she were to call it what it really is. His is a life worth having. And saving.

She does not want to admit this to herself, but it is inevitable that she does. She does not want to risk his happiness. He does not deserve to lose what he has gained at great cost, he does not deserve to die in a foreign land for the sake of someone else’s inability to let go of something they cannot have.

Smiling, she can see what will happen clearly, without any lurid interference from the Well. She will go north. Her former Commander will stay here in the south.

In Tevinter, she will try to help her lover and she will do her best. She will save him from himself, or she will not.

But, either way, she will not reveal now the fact of what he left her alone with. He will not get to see her smile.

 

**.**

 

 **I** t took him a long time to speak. The words were hard to think, to gather, to form.

“...But what...why, are you showing me this? What am I supposed to see?”

“It is not obvious?”

“No.”

“I see.”

“I...don’t.”

“Let me try one more. Can you manage something you also remember?”

Something—perhaps what’s left of his sense—tells him that this it. This will be the last one. So he can endure the endeavour.

“Yes.”

 

**.**

 

 **T** his place is one of many in the Crossroads. It doesn’t have a name. It doesn’t have a purpose. It’s just an interlude.

But, it is a planned one.

He has meant to lead her here. In privacy, in safety, drawn to him, she will be ready to have the Anchor removed. That is his main purpose and one of his goals.

She does not know that when she finally comes to him. This he remembers. She thinks that she has found him, has caught up with him, just in time. She will impress him with what she has figured out—that he is Fen’Harel. She calls him by one of his names.

When he smiles at her and tells she has done well, her heart flutters, and she is sick once more. Then the stress and the anguish of her still lingering loss feed the flare of searing white pain that renders her incapable. Falling to her knees, she clutches at the limb that is no longer her own and she swears she will bite off her own tongue before she falls apart in front of him. Such a death seems much more dignified to her yowling mind.

As he comforts her, he does not turn from his own resolve this time. Finally, at the end, he can manage it. She can’t appreciate this, not like he can—that he is coming forward with all that he is able to, giving her everything that he can, so that she can see and understand and have the chance to hate him like she should. Here is what he is. Here is what he has done. Here is what he will do. Laid out at her deserving feet are the totality of the sins that he can share. His behaviour before was inexcusable but there was a reason behind it. His goal now is to let her make a proper faultless break.

“Solas, please. Let me come with you.”

Garlanded in ethereal colours she cannot perceive, she watches him from her place of lesser power. Clinging, desperate, but—now, in these twilit hours, the light shifts, the memory slants to her perspective, and he is seeing that there was something else too. It shouldn’t surprise him that she still is capable of doing it, even after everything else, and even after her death at his hands. But here she is, glowing, illuminated in his seeing of her by a new side that he hadn’t managed to glance an inkling of before. Over a dawnless horizon another new possibility rises.

Like a puzzle with no solution, a mystery with no answer, a source of joy which never can be exhausted by even the most insatiable of minds. Solas, who should have been a scholar, who had once been happiest discovering in the world of dreams, did not truly allow himself to see this aspect of her at the time.

So he did not see that she was already waiting. Her smile on the cusp of being, in anticipation. Ready to answer to his response.

“You cannot,” he said. “There is nothing but death at the end of this path. I could not bear to let you see what I will become.”

He did not let her follow him.

And she was relieved.

Now it was her turn to treat him as he had treated her. Lying—though only ever by omission—she chose to not tell him the truth. He had finally given her the chance to be the betrayer. Taking her own fate into her hands, she allowed herself to shape her story, and pick her outcome, regardless of what anyone might have said about it. Regardlesss of what he thought he was going to do to the world, because she knew the terrible, horrible, true thing about him as he prepared to embark upon the last lonesome leg of his planned path.

Whatever she had told him, and whatever she had shown him, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Neither pride nor joy could’ve stopped him.

 

**.**

 

 **H** e really isn’t able to open his eyes. All he can do is wait to hear the spirit’s voice—pleasant and sweet and low like a whisper—if she will choose to speak to him. It is a choice he cannot make, he knows. He has already had his chances.

The spirit moves closer to him. Magic wreathes around him and envelopes him—emotion, thrumming through it, is gentle to him. The kindness is more than he deserves.

But, with hardly a voice left, he cannot protest any longer how the world decides to treat him. He told himself long, long ago he would accept whatever anyone else may do to him. Now his reckoning has come.

He does not ask, is the world better.

He does not ask, is the world worse.

He does not ask, is there any hope.

He does not ask, is my daughter alive.

Whatever he may want to know is not the way that this works. Only what is shared is what he can have.

Instead of yearning for wisdom, he lets his head fall back to slump at last. He lets the blearly, diaphanous crescent of an image come to him. As if seeing the world’s creation under sacred water, something resolves before him.

A woman, dressed in white, reaches her hand out to him.

He smiled at her.

**. . .**

**Author's Note:**

> thuast ma tel'nea neal ne - however, you will not see it. (roughly. it's broken, unwieldy structure and form and grammar reflects her lack of fluency in the language and her declining state of mind.)


End file.
